2:05 PM, April 24, 2012

Detroit Free Press columnist

Former Pontiac Emergency Manager Michael Stampfler painted a dark and gloomy picture of what could await Detroit based on his experiences in a smaller city with similar problems, saying that the emergency management system as it exists now is designed to fail.

"The financial approach is the dominant theme, and it’s good so far as it goes because we all know that fundamental in our private lives and public lives is that finances have to be sound," Stampfler said in a speech in Wyandotte this afternoon. "But my point is we’re not taking it far enough to build capacity.... so the community can pick up and ... run successfully after emergency management, after the books are balanced.

“And there isn’t sufficient attention given to capital infrastructure during this term of ... legislation to make it possible or these communities to make it own their own.”

In Pontiac, Stampfler said he "found absolutely no support for emergency management as the state’s occupying force. People do not appreciate that position."

But also broadly speaking, he said, there was a complete absence of management oversight, no capital improvement program for charting a path for the future and “how we’re going to spend money for infrastructure after emergency management.” He said the city did not even have “a computer system to manage people working virtually in the dark.”

Stampfler said there were "a lot of empty rooms with files where people left years before . . . a decimated police department that had been cut so often and so completely that it was difficult for them to perform and there was lots of evidence of corruption and a frightful absence of watching where the federal dollars were going.”

He was describing Pontiac, but it sounded a lot like Detroit.

"There is a perception ... there is an awareness that there is a negotiation process going on," Stampfler said. “When you have the mayor saying it’s going to take money, that’s part of a negotiation that says 'You can’t just come balance our books and then walk away because it isn’t going to work. It’s going to work for a very, very short period of time.

“You can sell off assets. You can break union contracts. But what’s the result of all that when they leave emergency management? Likely the next cycle begins?”

“Detroit,” he said, “recognizes that it's more than just balancing the books. There’s a lot more at stake. . . .I do think that’s appropriate."